V 1.3.9d: installed: German Language Pack , German language "special characters" include: ä, ö, ü, ß - if those look funny, it means your browser is not rendering them correctly.

Which is the point. In the German language pack, there are two text areas to insert the product description in the admin. The German text area should render the special characters correctly.

In my installation, the English text area is rendering the special characters correctly, and the German text area is rendering them as
�� . This should be reversed. I have no idea why this is happening.

Any help on this?? Poss. problem: I am looking at the browser rendering here in the USA on an American Firefox browser, what the IE is doing over there in Germany may be different. In which case, I'm helpless to see what the actual situation is there.
thanks
JSC